


Background Noise

by wordwhisper



Category: Chernobyl (TV 2019)
Genre: M/M, including the obligatory Queen reference, lots of 80s music references, sneaking to unbugged places and fooling the KGB
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-01
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2020-10-09 03:33:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20482160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wordwhisper/pseuds/wordwhisper
Summary: in which a lot of music is listened to and it does more than just trick the KGB.





	Background Noise

**Author's Note:**

> this entire fic basically stems from the thought of Valery and Boris listening to 'western' music, mostly to stay sane, and it becomes the theme to everything that's happening to them, which was something I just couldn't get out of my head afterwards (especially since I'm a huge Queen fan myself). The soundtrack can be found [here](https://wordwhisper.tumblr.com/post/187426955417/background-noise-valery-legasovboris)
> 
> And, of course, the usual disclaimer: this is entirely based on the characters of the HBO show and does not mean to depict any real historical events or persons (who I still have to read up on).

“It’s mine.”, Boris says when he puts the radio down on a rickety chair inside the barrack they’ve been using as their headquarters. It’s just getting dark in the doorframe behind him, a warm wind blowing from the east on what would have been a beautiful late summer’s evening if it had been anywhere but here.

“I never said it wasn’t.”

“No, but your face did.”

He pulls an antenna out of his coat-pocket just as Valery is about to turn back to the plan he’d been studying, barely bigger than the palm of his hand and Valery’s gaze immediately catches on it.

“Come on, don’t act like you never tried that.”

He crouches down as he carefully fits the antenna to the top with the kind of ease that suggests this really isn’t the first time he’s done this, fiddling with it until there’s a low hum of static coming through the speakers.

“I did. I just wouldn’t have pegged you as the type.”

“You’d be surprised.”

The connection shakily crackles to life the moment it finds a station, a female voice saying something in English before the first few chords of a song come through and Boris shots Valery an excited, little smile over his shoulder. It’s an old one from a few years ago that they used to play every night back then, as strange and invariably obnoxious as a coloured butterfly the poisoned air.

“Do you know that one?”

“I think even my cat knows that one.”

Boris’ mouth twitches, tapping the rhythm to the song on the chair with one hand.

“I wouldn’t have pegged you as the type.”, he echoes, almost gently.

Valery puts the pen down and pulls off his glasses to rub at his face, elbows resting on the stack of paper in front of him. He’s so far past tired that the letters are starting to blur in front of his eyes anyway.

“And what type would you have pegged me as?”

There’s absolutely no hesitation behind the answer, as though Boris’s seriously given it thought somewhere in between the sleepless nights and even more sleepless days.

“Rachmaninov. Beethoven. Something loud and dramatic.”

“Not a bad try, but sadly completely wrong.”

Boris gets up, snatching up the half-full bottle of Vodka as he walks over to the table.

“I’ll find out.”, he says while he refills their glasses for the third time that night, “We’ve got nothing if not time.”

For a moment, Valery almost believes him.

*****

Somehow it becomes a kind of ritual after that, mostly late at night long after even the KGB agent in Moscow has gotten sleepy. He doesn’t have any reason not to, after all.

  
Some nights they stay in the barrack, the music turned on full volume while Boris produces proper bean coffee from somewhere or first class Vodka from the hotel on the bad ones. Others they move to one of their rooms on the fifth floor, silently passing plans and cigarettes with a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo playing in the background. A few times other people walk in, team members, miners or one of the young soldiers coming in for a briefing from the liquidation camps and just stay for a few minutes while they smoke their cigarette. They all notice, of course, know how reckless this is but none of them care enough to bring it up.

“One of the boys got engaged today.”, Boris says out of nowhere one evening. A love-song is playing on the radio, something sweet and up-beat that’s apparently just started its first week in the charts. “They got a radio from somewhere and when they turned it on that song was playing. The girl arrived last night and she and her fiancé were swaying around to it, completely out of rhythm, her face buried in his neck.”

He closes his eyes, leaning back in his chair.

“It was the first time I’ve seen them really, genuinely happy.”

Valery stubs out his cigarette on the stairs in front of the barrack where he’s sat down on to smoke, eyes on the sky stretching above the silhouettes of the tents. It’s clear today, barely any clouds or machine smoke for the first time in weeks.

“It’s amazing isn’t it?”, he eventually says, “no matter how bad things get, the world somehow keeps on turning and sometimes humans manage to create incredible beauty out of unspeakable suffering.”

He can hear Boris move behind him, the click of glass against glass.

“Maybe that’s what’s going to keep us alive. Our ability to love. To see the best in everything.”

Valery laughs, a breathless, hysterical noise that feels like it’s bubbling out from somewhere in the back of his throat, although he doesn’t quite know why. He’s learned not to think about that too much.

“Let’s hope so.”

Then the song ends and the moment is gone. The next one is older, a lot of drums and a good guitar solo towards the end and they sit in comfortable silence until Boris suddenly asks:

“Boney M?”

“No.”

*****

Two days later, Boris discovers Queen.

Records start showing up beside the record player they'd brought into the barrack from the hotel bar, the early ones first, then the latest album that Boris tells him he got from London by pulling a few connections. And, as it turns out, they’re especially effective for creating the right background to communicate without being overheard. Valery exchanges the latest results of the radiological survey to ‘Save Me’, evacuation plans to ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ and on the night he has to phone colleagues at the institute to compare strategies it’s ‘I Want To Break Free’.

*****

One day the connection doesn’t work and they only manage to get a Russian programme from Kiev. It’s the middle of the news at ten p.m., read out by a sickeningly cheerful, male voice.

_ A new group of 400 men has been dispatched to Chernobyl where clean-up is proceeding at an incredible speed thanks to their heroic work. Next week, the last dispatch of another 300 men will arrive and the work itself is expected to be finished at the end of the month, a whole three weeks sooner than anticipated. Any dangers and the radiation levels are well in check and sources confirm that there is no further need to concern outside the exclusion zone and even inside it the levels of radiation are steadily sinking._

Boris starts to bring the rest of his own records with each brief visit to Moscow after that.

*****

“That was the first song I danced to at a school party.”

They’re in Valery’s room this time, the door of the cupboard open as Valery looks for a fresh sweater to wear while Boris changes in the bathroom. Rationally he knows that it’s not going to do very much if the contamination hasn’t and the other clothes have already been burned along with all the rest that had been worn in the field that day, but somehow it still helps, psychologically at least.

“I had just turned sixteen at the time, the last year of school, and there was this gorgeous girl, the elder sister of one of my classmates who wanted to dance with me.”

“Did you?”

“I mostly stepped on her feet, but yes I did.”

Valery pulls a blue sweater out, sliding it over his head before he closes the door again.

“I think I remember that one from a party as well but I never danced. My best friend back then tried to convince me the whole evening, but I just watched and drank instead.”

Boris has come out of the bathroom, sitting down on the bed as Valery moves to the window because even after they’ve been through it still feels to intimate to be joining him. A sharp voice cuts into the intro of the song that’s started to play, a melancholy, longing quality to it that hits really close to home for some reason.

“Led Zepplin?”

“No.”

*****

“They’re doing a parade. A fucking _parade_.”

The second glass hits the back wall of the barrack with a satisfying crutch, Valery’s hands shaking as he supports himself on the table top.

“There are going to be children there. Pregnant women.”

“There’s nothing you can do, Valery. You know how it works. How they work.”

His chest is heaving rapidly, but the air feels like it gets stuck somewhere on the way.

“You can’t save them all.”

“Yeah, apparently I can save no one.”

“We’re trying.”, Boris says softly. Valery wonders when he became the tough one. “Maybe that’s all you can expect with this.”

“No, it’s not. It can’t be.”

He’s being too loud, even with the music playing, but right now he wants them to hear. He wants everyone to hear.

“It’s not your fault.”

“I should have tried harder.”

“And what, die?”

“We’re already dying, Boris.”, Valery interrupts him, turning around to face him. In the background, a girl is singing about love. “How doesn’t matter anymore.”

“It will to them.”, Boris retorts just as a the last glass hits the wall at his right, his voice so tight it breaks around the last syllable. It’s the angriest, most annoyed Valery has seen him so far, like a school teacher who has to explain the same exercise to his students for the fourth time. He turns away to shut off the record player where the song is just fading out into its last chords and stays there, hands on either side of it.

“We’ll find a way.”, he adds after a few moments, his back still to Valery, “Just give yourself time.”

*****

It happens the time after that, too.

Valery is sitting at the hotel room’s small table next to the record player, Boris smoking at the window on the other side of the room and he immediately comes over and changes the record just as the last track is about to play.

“The Rolling Stones?”

There’s the soft sound of car engines slowing down outside, the new contingent of new man arriving for their first briefing before they’re sent to the liquidation camp. Valery thinks of the boy and his girl dancing to Whitney Huston on the white, smouldering ruins and has to close his eyes against the weave of nausea rising in his throat.

“No.”

*****

“David Bowie?”

The radio transmitter has been working that day and they’re playing a new song by a young, American artist called ‘Prince’ barely older than the boys they’re sending out into hell every day.

“No.”

*****

It feels incredibly stupid more than anything else, because he should be used to this by now. He’s been leaving his dosimeter in the barrack for weeks now because the only thing it really is is a distracting background noise, the buzz just before the alarm clock goes off. He shouldn’t care. He was so sure he didn’t. And yet here he is, trembling so hard as he pulls of the jacket and trousers he’s been wearing and drops them into a bin that he doesn’t manage to untie his shoes, barely able to breathe. The jacket hits the dosimeter laying in the corner the first time and it immediately crackles to life with an insistent, low hum. Valery picks the jacket up without reading the number, throwing it on top of the other clothes before he snatches a package of cigarettes from the table.

His fingers are still shaking too much to even light one and he gives up after a few tries and takes up a glass instead. It’s gotten cooler, the summer slowly drawing into an end, but it doesn’t feel like there are seasons anymore, just decay steadily taking whatever’s left. Nothing feels truly alive here. He shivers, still damp from the decontamination process, and even that seems detached, something that doesn’t really concern him – a kind of absolute, reckless numbness that’s scarier than anything else. By the second glass his breathing has calmed and his body seems more like it’s under his control, his hip propped against the table, when Valery’s eyes catch on the record player. Suddenly the silence in the room seems chocking, overwhelming, so he reaches for the record left on the table beside it with clumsy fingers, his heart racing against his ribs until the first notes come through the speaker.

Another shot later, the door creaks softly.

“He’s gone.”

Valery’s eyes drop shut, the heat of the shot settling sickeningly in his stomach. His lungs are burning, bile rising in to mouth to the point where he feels like he’s going to throw up.

Behind them, the girl is singing about love.

“They say that his friend is probably going to survive, but either way he’ll have to life with it for the rest of his life. And I know you don’t –”

Their lips catch, sliding against each other at first before Boris tilts his head and starts to respond properly, Valery’s hands pressed to the metal of the wall on either side of Boris’ head. They’re shaking again, knuckles white with the force of it, but it’s a shaking he can deal with. Boris’ hands come to rest on Valery’s side, moving up and down his back as his mouth opens against Valery’s. Warm. _Alive_. After a few moments one of his hands drops from Valery’s body and then he’s suddenly pulling away, leaning over to the record player just as the girl sings her last verse.

He skips back to the beginning this time.

*****

Once, Boris sings.

They’re out at the edge of the town sitting on the doorsteps of one of the abandoned houses on a night neither of them can sleep, long enough that the sun has starting to rise in a quivering weave of red and orange. Even that looks artificial, threatening here. It’s the same thing that’s been bothering him about the quiet since the evacuations have started – it’s too perfect, too full of noise to be natural. Valery doesn’t recognize the song, some kind of old folk tune that reminds him of his childhood, his mother singing to him softly with her hand runs through his hair and her skin smelling like the summer’s first lemons but there’s so much longing behind it that he feels tears welling in his eyes. Boris doesn’t look at him, gaze fixed on the empty shop on the other side of the street and at the end his voice breaks like that song he never plays.

*****

“The Bee-Gees?”

It’s been one of the good days, no one has died, and Valery allows himself to smile, stubbing his cigarette out on a stone below him.

“Still no.”

*****

The second time, it’s Boris who kisses him.

Valery’s back hits the dirt floor with a shaky gasp, his legs parting as Boris settles between them and braces himself on his hands. The radio is on this time, some rock-and roll song playing he’s never heard before either and he can see part of the stars through the open crack in the ceiling next to Boris’ shoulder. It’s insane, absolutely, completely irrational and it’s the first time he feels really, truly alive.

_ I think that even this early it’s fair to say that with this song Bon Jovi, whose lead singer and rhythm-guitar player Jon Bon Jovi started out sweeping floors and cooking tea in his uncle’s recording studio Power Station for rock royalty like Queen have now firmly established themselves as an act to be reckoned with. It’s called ‘Livin’ On A Prayer’, another single taken from the band’s latest album ‘Slippery When Wet’ and critics are already excited for what they have to offer us next._

Boris’ lips brush against his chin the line of his jaw. His breath is warm against Valery’s cheek, voice carefully quiet like there’s no music playing in the background.

“If you want me to stop tell me now.”

Valery’s nails graze down his back beneath his shirt, pushing it up with the movement, until he feels Boris shake against him. He’s hard, shallowly rutting against Valery’s thigh.

“Shut up and kiss me.”

*****

It’s not the music but what they’re doing that are the dangerous noises now.

The knowledge is exhilarating, makes Valery want to do this until they actually hear, scream and fight and laugh and he doesn’t just feel alive, he feels free. Free in the way they used to talk about in ink and hushed voices.

*****

Boris has two scars, one across his left shoulder and one on his right side that he’s covered up with a small tattoo of a ship. One night when they’re laying in Valery’s bed, sated and still panting a little, their arms touching between them, he tells him that the one on his side is a shrapnel from a grenade during a Finnish attack in the Winter War. He and his troops had been surprised in the section of the forest they were camping in and two of the soldiers he’d gotten to know best had been immediately killed. He’d still been carrying a letter to the girlfriend of one of them in his pocket because the boy had thought that it had better chances of actually getting through if it came from him. A few centimeters further up and he’d have been killed, too. Sometimes, when Valery watches his quick, calculated movements, the way his whole posture changes in certain situations, he thinks he never really left.

He’ll never leave.

The second one on his shoulder had been a car accident late at night, driving back from a trip to the coast, his girlfriend at the time sitting in the passenger's seat. A truck had run over a red light and the street had been so badly lit that he hadn’t seen them until he’d hit their side. The car had somersaulted, eventually coming to a stop against a tree near the road.

He’d gotten the scar, the girl wouldn’t be able to walk for the rest of her life.

Maybe that’s all life is about. Perspective. Collecting pain and loss until something worse comes along.

The scars he can’t see are the ones Valery tries not to think about.

The girl sings about love.

The record skips to the beginning.

*****

“What do you think would have happened if we’d met earlier?”, Boris asks one night, his head resting on Valery’s chest, but what Valery hears is ‘Time is running out, isn’t it?’.

The scars you don’t see.

The girl singing about love.

“It’s very unlikely that we ever would have so it doesn’t really matter, does it?”

He immediately realizes it’s the wrong thing to say and Boris’ finger stops trailing down his side.

“I don’t know, you probably wouldn’t have liked me.”, he adds, “And we wouldn’t have had a disaster to force us to work it out.”

“You were one of the rebels, weren’t you?”

Valery laughs, an ugly, broken little noise in the back of his throat.

“No, I was the deputy director of the Kurchatov institute.”

“That just means you know how to think.”

“It means I know how to think like _them_.”

Boris props himself up on his elbow, is hand shifting to Valery’s stomach.

“I know ‘them’, Valery, I’ve spend half of my life around them and if there’s anything you don’t do like them it’s think.”, he says sharply, “It all comes down to that because the worst thing is not to not be free, it’s to not even realize you’re not. They listen and they observe and they shape the world with their words and they think that’s what makes them free, but it’s a freedom they have to feed, people repeating their words, their actions, their very thoughts, and in the end that’s what controls them. Once people stop doing that, they stop existing.”

The song’s second verse of the song is starting behind them, the muffled sound of a male voice drifting up from the street below.

“So believe me, whoever you are, you’re not like them.”

“My father was the head of the committee of compliance, my mother helped organize the communist youth. I never knew anything but the world they created.”

He stops, his gaze drifting up to look at the ceiling instead.

It’s covered in peeling, yellow paint, a wet spot forming on the side.

“Until it blew apart.”

“That’s why governments have always feared people who’ve been to war. You can’t un-teach them how to be free. And you can’t lie to them.”

“Not everyone has been to war.”

“Not every war is fought with weapons.”, Boris retorts and Valery can hear the smile in his voice, “sometimes it’s an antenna on an old radio.”

The last chords of the song fade out and Valery expects Boris get up to skip the song, but this time stays there, sitting beside him on the bed as the player scratches along the pause before the next one.

“That’s my last guess.”, he says just before it starts, “I’m pretty sure I got it this time.”

It’s a slow song, another one by Queen, about needing the right person at one, specific moment. When it’s over, he just smiles.

“I knew you’d get it eventually.”

**Author's Note:**

> I really needed to get that out of my system. Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed the ride as much as I did, comments/kudos are always appreciated of course and if you want to come to talk more I'm on tumblr (wordwhisper.tumblr.com/ask).


End file.
